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Health

Chinese Woman Almost Dies After Injecting Herself with Fruit Juice

Don't try this at home.
IV drip and fruit juice
Left: WikiCommons. Right: Pixabay.

Looking at the countless of wellness trends over the last decade, you'll learn that people will do just about anything to unlock the secret to ultimate health. Some have sworn eating dirt, only raw fruits and even solely raw meat.

A woman in China recently took this healthy living obsession to the next level when she almost died after injecting herself with raw fruit juice.

Everything went downhill when a 51-year-old woman surnamed Zeng from Guiyang used the juice of over 20 different fruits and gave herself a homemade intravenous drip, the South China Morning Post reports.

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She felt itchy and warm, but did nothing about it until her husband found out about her procedure and took her to a county hospital. She was then sent to the Affiliated Hospital of Xiangnan University. In intensive care, doctors found the woman suffered liver, kidney, heart and lung damage, the BBC reports. Her blood was cleansed using dialysis, then she was given clotting agents and antibiotics.

“I had thought fresh fruits were very nutritious and it would not do me harm by injecting them into my body” Zeng told the Xiaoxiang Morning Herald.

Fruitarians, or people who eat primarily raw fruit, claim the diet gives them more energy, clears their mind, controls their blood sugar and more. But experts say that fruitarians aren't as healthy as they think. The diet actually deprives them of stuff like Vitamin B12, calcium, iodine, and omega-3 fatty acids, leading to anemia and a weak immune system, health expert Lisa DeFazio told Broadly.

Zeng’s case has stirred public debate in China over general public knowledge about health. On Weibo, over 11,000 users have used the hashtag #OldWomanPutsJuiceIntoVeins, the BBC reports.

One user wrote: “She is really someone who knows how to conduct intravenous injection and is brave enough to do it. Luckily her husband knows better. I am happy she survived.”

We are left with so many questions about this though. Where did the woman get the utensils for an IV drip? How did she know how to safely inject herself? Did she read about the ‘recipe’ online?

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